Rewrite That Witch
CH820 · Rewrite
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Chapter 820: The Journey

A week later, Echo told Lorgar that the Wildflame clan had officially decided to migrate.

The terms were agreed: three phases, staggered to reduce the strain on Graycastle’s logistics. The land grant was generous — the most fertile fields near the estuary in the old town, positioned between Clearwater Bay and the port. It was the kind of allocation that made clear the king understood what he was receiving in return for it.

The full migration would take more than a year. The first cohort would arrive in several weeks. To manage the transition for a clan of Wildflame’s size and complexity, someone senior and trusted needed to stay at Port of Clearwater for the duration — and Drow Silvermoon, who had been missing Neverwinter since the moment she left it, volunteered to extend her stay and oversee the settlement. The king approved this.

Ashes, Andrea, and Hummingbird would leave as planned, aboard The Roland, heading west.

Echo gave Lorgar the choice: leave with the witches, or stay and wait for her clan.

Lorgar didn’t deliberate.

She would leave with Ashes.

Her father and brother could handle the inter-clan affairs. They were capable of it — more capable than most people who had not watched them work would assume. And her presence would complicate rather than smooth things: she had relinquished her succession rights, and arriving in the immediate aftermath of that decision with her clan’s largest migration in memory underway would invite misreadings she didn’t want to manage. It was better to leave clearly. Sooner rather than later.

Beyond the practical reasoning, there was the other kind: everything she’d heard from Ashes and Andrea over these past weeks had built in her chest into a pressure that was recognizable, familiar. She knew what that pressure was. She had felt it before every holy duel, and after every fight that had pushed her past what she’d previously believed was her ceiling.

She wanted to go.

The things waiting in Neverwinter — the combat witches, the formidable enemies massing under the Red Mist in the wilderness, the great chief who was physically unremarkable according to Ashes but had somehow built all of this — she wanted to see all of it. She wanted to measure herself against it.

The next morning, Echo walked them down to the dock.

The ship was steel. Lorgar had seen the concrete boats before — large, heavy, somehow still floating — but standing at the boarding ramp of The Roland, she understood that it was categorically different. The weight of the hull alone dwarfed anything she could easily compare it to. She had grown up surrounded by metal as a precious and carefully managed resource: weapons and armor, the family’s holdings, trade goods priced accordingly. Looking at the ship, she tried to estimate how many thousands of Mojin weapons and pieces of armor their combined metal would come to.

She couldn’t reach a useful estimate. There was too much of it.

She found a place at the railing and held it. The dock was below her now. Echo stood on the pier with the particular expression of someone who was genuinely happy for the people leaving and genuinely sorry to see them go. Lorgar looked at her for a moment, then dropped her ears in the slight, contained gesture that was the closest she had to a formal farewell that wasn’t performed.

The ship’s horn sounded.

Deep. Single note. The water at the hull’s edge began to disturb.

The Roland turned west, steadily and slowly, and then with increasing purpose, and the port fell behind.

Lorgar kept her hands on the railing and watched the distance open between the ship and the shore until the dock was small enough that she could no longer make out Echo’s figure within it.

She turned her face toward the western horizon.

Whatever was there, she was going to meet it.

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